According to the publishers blurb The Presence of Mind
argues that beliefs and desires have a legitimate place in the
explanation of action. A philosophically uninformed purchaser
might conclude that 252 pages including substantial notes and
a detailed bibliography was a lot of space to spend on establishing
this mundane thesis. In fact, though, Hutto’s book provides an
interesting and often convincing account of a number of issues
about the nature of intentionality the property that mental states
have in virtue of which they represent aspects of the world. Many
of the best-known figures in the philosophy of mind have devoted
a great deal of energy to these issues over the past twenty years.
A merit of this book is that it presents a comprehensive and well-balanced
account of many topics, which are normally only discussed in specialist
journals.

The main focus of Hutto’s book, is whether we can give a naturalistic
account of intentionality. Translated out of philosophers jargon
the issue is whether we should expect to be able to give a scientific
account of how my desire for a glass of beer, or my dogs belief
that there is water in its dish come to have these particular
features of the world as their objects. Philosophers from both
the analytic and phenomenological traditions — Quine and Brentano
being the most famous examples — have sometimes thought that
we should not.

Anyone who agrees with these two seems forced to say that psychology
cannot be a science or at least not a natural science. (One could
resist this conclusion by denying that intentional states such
as beliefs and desires were part of the subject matter of psychology,
but this does not seem an attractive option.) Some writers have
gone further and said that it is not merely the scientific status
of psychology that is at stake here, but the role that beliefs
and desires can play in our everyday understanding of ourselves.

A strength of Hutto’s book is that it insists that questions about
the scientific status of psychology and about the legitimacy of
our everyday practices should be kept separate. His response to
the first issue is to develop what he takes to be a naturalistically
acceptable account of one basic form of intentionality. Roughly
speaking his conclusion is that we can account for the content
of an intentional response to the world by thinking of it as being
determined by its information-bearing function . This is an argumentative
strategy pioneered by the American philosopher Ruth Millikan,
who has argued that the most plausible way to make the concept
of intentionality naturalistically acceptable is to attempt to
explicate it in terms of biological concepts – of which function
is one.

Provided that the notion of function is legitimate in biology
and there is an intricate philosophical literature arguing that
it is even in these post-Darwinian times this seems a fairly plausible
line. If biology is not one of the natural sciences, what is?
Nevertheless one worry about Hutto’s line is worth airing. Hutto
holds that one reason for preferring a Millikan-style account
of intentionality to some others on offer is that it means that
the content of such intentional responses is fully determinate,
and intuitively plausible. So to take a well-worn example frogs
can be legitimately described as seeing flies rather than little
black dots, even though they cannot distinguish flies from (say)
small stones flicked across their field of vision by an experimenter,
because in order to explain the workings of the frogs perceptual
system we have to say that its function is to enable the frog
to catch flies.

However it may not be just the notion of function, which is doing
the work here. Some seems to be being done by considerations of
what would be a good functional explanation. This is problematic
because the notion of explanation itself may turn out to need
explicating in a way, which makes reference to intentional concepts.
So it is possible that instead of an account of intentionality
in naturalistic terms we have an account of intentionality in
terms of a further notion, which is still intentional. How much
of a worry this may depend on exactly what one takes naturalism
to entail – and it is perhaps a pity that this is one issue which
Hutto does not discuss in detail.

It is not obvious how much of a problem this objection poses to
Hutto’s overall strategy. In the second half of the book he argues
that the naturalistic account, which he has given, is only half
the story about intentionality. It is an account of the basic
non-conceptual intentional responses of animals and possibly pre-linguistic
children, but not of mature language users. Ascriptions of beliefs
and desires to language users have an irreducibly normative dimension
which means they cannot be naturalized. Given this two-tier account
it might be open to Hutto to own up to allow some indeterminacy
in the intentional responses of prelinguistic creatures while
hanging on to determinate contents for full-blown beliefs and
desires.

However, by arguing for the existence of this normative dimension,
Hutto seems to concede that full-blown beliefs and desires cannot
play a role in scientific theorizing . At this point the distinction
drawn at the beginning of the book between the acceptability of
intentional notions for scientific purposes and their everyday
usability becomes important. For Hutto argues deftly that even
if full-blown beliefs and desires cannot play a role in scientific
theorizing, this does not prevent them from being real, since
in the words of Putnam (whom he quotes), there are whole domains
of fact with respect to which science tells us nothing at all.

This position is easier to state than defend and though much of
what Hutto says here is plausible it would be interesting to see
the anti-naturalistic metaphysical position, which he is committed
to deal with at greater length. But this may be too much to expect
from a book, which has already covered a great deal of interesting
ground. It is encouraging that we are promised a further book
from the same author and publisher entitled Beyond Physicalism,
which attempts to address this issue.

© 2001 Bill Wringe

Bill Wringe, Ph.D., Department
of International Relations, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey.

Categories: Philosophical

Tags: Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences